Thomas Edison held over a thousand patents, but his greatest invention may have been the myth of the lone genius. In reality, Edison ran an industrial research laboratory staffed by dozens of engineers and technicians whose contributions he routinely took credit for. He was less a solitary inventor than a brilliant project manager and ruthless businessman who understood that controlling the narrative mattered as much as controlling the technology.

This episode examines the gap between the Edison myth and the Edison method, tracing his career from telegraph operator to the Menlo Park laboratory, the war of currents against Tesla and Westinghouse, and the corporate playbook that built an empire on other people's ideas.

• Edison's self-taught origins and the telegraph experiments that launched his career
• The Menlo Park "invent ...